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The Network Visibility Problem

Published: 27 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Social media is an attention economy where broadcasters are constantly competing for attention in their followers’ feeds. Broadcasters are likely to elicit greater attention from their followers if their posts remain visible at the top of their followers’ feeds for a longer period of time. However, this depends on the rate at which their followers receive information in their feeds, which in turn depends on the broadcasters they follow. Motivated by this observation and recent calls for fairness of exposure in social networks, in this article, we look at the task of recommending links from the perspective of visibility optimization. Given a set of candidate links provided by a link recommendation algorithm, our goal is to find a subset of those links that would provide the highest visibility to a set of broadcasters. To this end, we first show that this problem reduces to maximizing a nonsubmodular nondecreasing set function under matroid constraints. Then, we show that the set function satisfies a notion of approximate submodularity that allows the standard greedy algorithm to enjoy theoretical guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real data gathered from Twitter show that the greedy algorithm is able to consistently outperform several competitive baselines.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Non-Submodular Maximization via the Greedy Algorithm and the Effects of Limited Information in Multi-Agent Execution2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982070(10118-10125)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Reposting Service in Online Social Networks: Modeling and Online Incentive Protocols2022 IEEE 30th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP55882.2022.9940336(1-11)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Graph Technologies for User Modeling and Recommendation: Introduction to the Special Issue - Part 1ACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/347759640:2(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021

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cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 40, Issue 2
April 2022
587 pages
ISSN:1046-8188
EISSN:1558-2868
DOI:10.1145/3484931
Issue’s Table of Contents
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 September 2021
Accepted: 01 April 2021
Revised: 01 February 2021
Received: 01 October 2020
Published in TOIS Volume 40, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Link recommendation
  2. network optimization
  3. fairness of exposure
  4. visibility optimization
  5. submodularity

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View all
  • (2022)Non-Submodular Maximization via the Greedy Algorithm and the Effects of Limited Information in Multi-Agent Execution2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982070(10118-10125)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Reposting Service in Online Social Networks: Modeling and Online Incentive Protocols2022 IEEE 30th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP55882.2022.9940336(1-11)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Graph Technologies for User Modeling and Recommendation: Introduction to the Special Issue - Part 1ACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/347759640:2(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021

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